What should be the URL pattern for communities

[cellio]

@curiousdannii

Ah, I’m familiar with canonical posts, but I would have always kept them in the main Q&A. I guess there could be merits with having them separated.

A site could do it either way. Having a category for them makes it easier to find them all, and they’d usually share tags with main.

Responses to your meta list:

@curiousdannii

High contrast theme for quick visual impact

Yes, each category can have CSS. Codidact would offer some standard themes and suggested associations (use the gray theme for meta, people tend to use the blue theme for wikis/canonicals/etc, that sort of thing).

@curiousdannii

Separate tags as there will be tags with the same name that need to be kept separate from main Q&A

Yes, covered in the spec already. A category can have its own tag set or share.

@curiousdannii

Separate profile pages so you can see people’s meta contributions by themselves (the list of posts could be accomplished by search filters, but you shouldn’t need to know how to use filters in order to get to it)

Frame challenge: one profile page, and when you visit it from a category the filter to show that category’s stuff is auto-applied. (But you can then choose other filters to move among categories if you like, and maybe we even give you an “all” tab.)

@curiousdannii

Separate search (again a user shouldn’t have to know how to use search filters in order to just search meta, so something that applies the appropriate filters would be essential)

Ditto: search should automatically filter to the current category by default. If you want to search the entire site (all categories), that requires some sort of explicit action TBD.

@curiousdannii

Separate queues because there are different standards, for example opinion questions are common on meta

No queues yet, but yes reviews need to be separate. I think that can still be one queue and an auto-filter, though. Or if that’s not practical, then maybe queues, like tag sets, are separable. That’s a decision for later when we get to the review mechanism (which could well be just a list of stuff on one page and not something like the SE queue – who knows?).

@curiousdannii

n that vein, separate custom close reasons?

Good point. Close reasons, like tag sets, should be able to be category-specific. (I’m going to say not MVP here, as for MVP I think we’re creating about three close reasons and “other” + textbox.)

@curiousdannii

Clear navigation so that for example you won’t accidentally click from the main site directly to meta’s tag list and vice versa

We need to be thoughtful about navigation, yes. I think we can be but we don’t have mockups yet.

[curiousdannii]

@cellio

Frame challenge: one profile page, and when you visit it from a category the filter to show that category’s stuff is auto-applied. (But you can then choose other filters to move among categories if you like, and maybe we even give you an “all” tab.)

Yes this could work well. But how is it really that different to a separate meta site? What’s the advantage of doing the way you see it? (Feel free to move this to another topic if you want.)

Edit: I’ve seen some discussion about how categories could be used for sandboxes and how area 51 could be one site with a lot of trial categories, so I can see how that would be useful.

It will just take quite a bit of work to make it very ergonomic.

[cellio]

@curiousdannii

Yes this could work well. But how is it really that different to a separate meta site? What’s the advantage of doing the way you see it?

First, it’s not just meta – we’d need to apply the same approach to any category. So where you’re thinking “two sites/profiles”, consider that it might be three or four.

---

User profiles:

One concern is syncing. There’s some stuff that we always want to show; separate profiles/sites means syncing, which we’ve seen on SE is sometimes slow or glitchy. This might be minor, but part of me is thinking “explosion of tables/rows for no clear purpose” when we already have the category ID available for each post.

Another is navigation; it’s more clicks and “navigational knowledge” to switch among categories with entirely separate profiles, versus choosing a category from a dropdown or tabs or something and watching just the part of the page that’s different swap. (Scope creep: I don’t know if that partial-reload thing is easy, hard, ill-advised, etc. Just an example.)

A unified profile feels cleaner to me, both from a UX perspective and from an implementation perspective.

---

Site structure in general:

A site has a certain amount of “overhead”, stuff that needs to exist to support that site at all. I don’t know how large or small this body of code, HTML, and CSS is. (It’s another URL, at least.) For a per-site meta and a per-site blog and a per-site wiki and so on, most of this would be duplicated, versus just having it once by moving the “separation” (categories) down a level. It feels like separate sites lead to more cloning and bloat. I don’t know if that’s really true; is’t just a feeling. But it led me to ask myself: is it needed? Is it helpful? And I think the answer to both is “no”.

---

Edit: I saw your edit only after posting this.

[manassehkatz]

1 - I really do think Meta works as a Category within a Community, rather than as a separate-but-linked-community (which is how it appears to work to an ordinary user in SE). The one part where I’m not sure is Tags - I see arguments for having tags shared between Main & Meta and other reasons for separate tags. Meta is truly a special case (Blogs, Canonical, Sandbox could/should share tags with Main) so one option would a per-tag setting about whether it applies to Meta. On the other hand, if a tag simply doesn’t get used in Meta then it is effectively irrelevant there and the flip side for a tag in Main (e.g., something like “spam” or “profile” or whatever referring to Meta-like-issues should simply not show up in Main and be edited out quickly if not relevant).

2 - Unified profile within a community makes sense. “You” are the same person in a given community whether on Main or Meta. That is different from multiple communities - someone could describe themselves as an “expert” in one community (due to education or employment) and just an ordinary “enthusiast” in another community. And we already have plans to support that - with the option to keep the profile for any (or all) communities “same as Instance” so that no synchronization process is needed if that’s your preference.

[cellio]

@manassehkatz

I see arguments for having tags shared between Main & Meta and other reasons for separate tags. Meta is truly a special case (Blogs, Canonical, Sandbox could/should share tags with Main) so one option would a per-tag setting about whether it applies to Meta.

I was thinking of the idea of “tag sets”, with a tag belonging to one set. Some categories will share a set, as you noted, but meta is special. Consider the Writing case: the main site has an “editing” tag, and so does its meta, and they mean different things. Those questions should not be combined when you look at the tag. Server Fault might have a “spam” tag (don’t know, just an example) and so might its meta; again, different uses.

@manassehkatz

Unified profile within a community makes sense. “You” are the same person in a given community whether on Main or Meta. That is different from multiple communities

Absolutely. I’m talking about within a community here. Users need to be able to present differently per-community (plus network-wide).